Microsoft has over 4100 MVP’s that are certified to provide support to itscustomers. According to Toby Richards, Microsoft’s General Manager ofCommunities and Online Support, these MVP’s are thirty times more active thanthe average user. In fact, Microsoft considers them a “tremendous asset thatprovide support in multiple languages across 98 countries.”

the next major Windows Phone 7 update (code name: Mango) will be released in fall 2011. It will be available as a free update for all existing WPH7 devices. New devices will have Mango installed. Mango will bring you over 500 improvements the most important of which can be grouped in 3 categories:

Monday, 16 May 2011

as you know AppVerifier was replaced by Resource Leak Detector (RLD) in Windows Embedded Compact 7. Unfortunately RLD does not cover all the scenarios you could use AppVerifier for.

So today is your lucky day: you can find an updated version of AppVerifier for Windows Embedded Compact 7 that allows the creation of custom shims and does NOT require a KITL connection on MSDN Code Gallery.

Monday, 2 May 2011

in my first tutorial I showed you how to create a Silverlight for Windows Embedded (SWE) application for Windows Embedded Compact 7 using Expression Blend 3, PlatformBuilder and the Windows Embedded Silverlight Tools (WEST) to create a PlatformBuilder subproject.

Today I want to show you how you can use WEST to create a SWE application stand-alone from Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) WITHOUT PlatformBuilder.

For this tutorial you need to have VS2008 SP1 installed on your machine.

NOTE: For this tutorial we will use the WEST sample project that can be found under C:\Program Files\Windows Embedded Silverlight Tools\WindowsEmbeddedSilverlightClock. Of course you can simply reuse the SWE project we created for the first tutorial.

2. Export/install a Windows Embedded Compact 7SDK that supports SWE.

3. Open VS2008, go to File New Project… Select Visual C++ Smart Device as the project type and use the WEST template Silverlight for Windows Embedded Application. Choose an appropriate project name and location.

Click the OK button.

4. Click the Next button in the appearing Silverlight for Windows Embedded Project Wizard.

5. Select your Platform SDK with SWE support that we installed in step 2. Click Next.

6. Select the above mentioned Expression Blend project.

7. Click Next to generate the C++ code for our SWE project.

NOTE: If the path to the Expression Blend project contains spaces the validation will return errors. Since we are not creating a PlatformBuilder subproject, these errors will not concern us.